Unmanned vehicles (UVs) are vehicles which may carry sensory, computational and communications or other payloads, but no on-board human pilot. This can include unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Unmanned vehicles may be used to perform tasks in which the presence of a human pilot is undesirable or unfeasible. For example, UVs can be used by military forces in combat scenarios in order to avoid or minimize human casualties.
One application of unmanned vehicles is in searching an area containing static or moving targets. This task requires that one or more unmanned vehicles carry a sensor able to detect the particular target being sought. To reduce search time and improve performance when the search area is large relative to the range of a single unmanned vehicle, it may be desirable to deploy a plurality of unmanned vehicles that can carry out the search in a collaborative fashion.
Prior attempts to control a plurality of unmanned vehicles often have relied on predefined motion patterns, such as commanding each unmanned vehicle to cover one particular portion of the search area. Such approaches tend to be brittle: failure of a single unmanned vehicle may result in portions of the area remaining unsearched. Furthermore, such control schemes may not adapt well to changing conditions, such as the presence of moving targets, or changes in the search area resulting from available intelligence. Additionally, because such control schemes often have to be centralized (i.e., the movement of the vehicles is controlled from a single location), such approaches may lead to rapid increases in the communication bandwidth requirements, and in the complexity of the controlling schemes.